Virtual Memory Tuning

From Notes

There are several virtual memory settings that could increase the filesystem performance on a system running the 2.6 Linux kernel. With the following settings, I saw a speed increase of 7MB/sec on a Lenovo Thinkpad t60p.

# VM controls - tighten up 2.6 kernel use of VM
vm.dirty_ratio=10
vm.dirty_background_ratio=2

# higher number indicates higher propensity to swap rather than use RAM
vm.swappiness=20

These settings can be set in the /etc/sysctl.conf or with sysctl at runtime.

sysctl -w vm.dirty_ratio=10
sysctl -w vm.dirty_background_ratio=2
sysctl -w vm.swappiness=20